Hello and welcome, it’s Jane with the Nerve’s Weekend edition.
In his brilliant column today, Stewart Lee tells how Nigel Farage’s performative laying of a wreath for Ann Widdecombe at a Dartmoor vigil has gone viral. Scroll down for the link.
And the Farage revelations just keep on coming: so fast, you may miss one before the next appears. On this week’s The Rest Is Politics podcast, back from a 10-day silent retreat, Rory Stewart was updated by his regular co-host Alastair Campbell on recent events: “We have the £5m donation which keeps going and going,” says Alastair, “and Farage keeps being asked about it and he can’t get away from it. We then have ‘Posh George’ … and all sorts of stories that people like Carole Cadwalladr were shouting about years ago are suddenly being written about by the papers that back then said she was like one of those single cat ladies or whatever that insult was…”
Which brings me on to our must-read piece by Carole in today’s edition. It’s an article that has been years in the writing, really, laying out the entire story (or at least the legally safe one) of how she has been tracking Nigel Farage since Brexit. How our institutions, including the media, went missing in action. And how Carole’s court case, in which she was personally sued by Brexit funder Arron Banks, seemed to have a chilling effect on further scrutiny of the funding behind Brexit. As Carole says: “If you’re wondering why Reform was dumb enough to accept donations from the mother of a money-laundering crypto expert and convicted criminal, it’s because the lack of any serious scrutiny of Farage created a sense of impunity.”
Here are the links to today’s stories:
There have been so many scoops about Nigel Farage’s financial arrangements. First, the Guardian revealed he accepted and failed to declare a £5m gift from Thailand-based cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne. Then came the Sunday Times’s story about his funding from convicted money launderer George Cottrell. For 10 years, Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr has been on the trail of Farage, his funding and his foreign links. Why are these stories only landing now? It all comes back to Brexit: and here she lays out how any serious interrogation of the forces behind the vote to leave were stymied. Read her deep dive here.
The policing and political response to the shocking death of Ann Widdecombe has been on Stewart’s mind this week. Initially, investigators’ indication was that the killing had not been related to politics. Then, he writes, that guidance changed – “a massively mismanaged own goal”. But modern police forces are working in a hyped-up, online age, and are realising that “Dixon Of Dock Green now has to operate as if he were Dixon Of The Explosive Unregulated Social Media Town Square Where Extreme Content And Uninformed Speculation Is Deliberately Monetised”. Read Stewart’s brilliant column here
Max Porter. Photo: Sophie Bassouls / Getty
He’s the bestselling writer of some of the most imaginative novels of recent years, including Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny and Shy (now also an acclaimed film called Steve), and this month Max Porter is releasing a wild and witty children’s picture book, Dogs and Bears. Today he’s sharing his brilliant perspective on life with our interviewer Jude Rogers for the Nerve Q&A. What would he do if he were made prime minister tomorrow? “The first thing,” he says, “is call Carole Cadwalladr and say: ‘Let’s have a 10am meeting with Palantir to tell them to get the fuck out of our country and then go from there.’” Read the interview here
L – R: Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as Athena in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Has film-maker Christopher Nolan done it again? His shelves are already heaving with awards after Oppenheimer, and now you can’t move for five-star reviews of his epic reimagining of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the warrior-king and Anne Hathaway as his abandoned wife. Forget “the huffy classicists whose ears twitch at the flat American vowels,” says our film critic Ellen E Jones: “such quibbles are crushed by the narrative’s colossal stride”. Read Ellen’s excellent review here
Most people, even the most dedicated cooks among us, must have those evenings when they want to eat but don’t feel like cooking. Richard Makin, aka @schoolnightvegan, is here to help. His new book, Stress-Free Dinners, has meals that take virtually no time at all to make. He shares a simple but delicious noodle recipe with the promise: “This nutritious dinner requires zero cooking and can be on the table in 10 minutes.” Get the recipe here.
A couple of weeks ago, we launched the Nerve Bookshop. We are adding titles as they are mentioned in articles and have just created a space for books by Nerve writers (Stewart Lee, Deborah Frances-White, Cory Doctorow). Go and have a browse! There’s Ellen E Jones’s prize-winning Screen Deep; an impressive pile by our theatre critic Dorian Lynskey; three titles from Lucia Osborne-Crowley and many more. We are delighted that the debut novel, At the Edge of the Woods, by our ex-Observer colleague Kathryn Bromwich has just been published in a UK edition and we have added that. Plus you can pre-order her follow-up, Distortion, ahead of its publication next February. Here is the link to the bookshop.
That’s it for today. But just one final request: if you click on the ad below it will earn us a little extra revenue. We will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday.
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The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech – brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.
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L-r: Lynsey, Sarah, Carole, Jane and Imogen